Sunday, October 25, 2015

That's one mellow rabbit...

It’s midterm and homework scoring time for me, and I’d like to share
some things that my students wrote that brought a smile to my face.

Some of my classes had a homework assignment in which they
had to write a paragraph describing one of their long-term goals, and here are
some of the responses I got:

My long-term goal is to be
Egypt.

My long-term goal is to become a
gracias choir (I thought she'd made a spelling mistake, but it’s actually a thing.)

I would like to make a boyfriend
(In Korean, people say “make a partner” rather than “get a partner”).

I will play with my boyfriend.

My long-term goal is that I will
buy my house and live with three cats.
When I graduate a universe, I will make money, so I will buy my
house.

These same students had to describe photos on their midterm
exam using a sense word (feel, smell, taste, etc.) and an adjective; I got
these delightful responses:

I laugh at these good-naturedly; I’ve made a ton of mistakes
while learning and practicing Korean, like the time I told an ER nurse that I
was taking doughnuts as medication, or the time I told a Buddhist monk that I
was gay because I liked vegetables (I’d just started learning Korean, and the
words for vegetable and woman are kind of similar).

When I make a mistake in front of my class and my students
get to laugh with me – with me, because I always laugh at myself – it’s an
important moment.They get to see that
their professor is just a human being like they are, doing her best and
learning from her mistakes. The best example of this was when we were talking about exotic
foods we’d eaten; I wanted to tell my students that I’d eaten alligator (ageo),
but what I actually said was that I’d eaten a human baby (agi).Lols forever!